In the news: A new report from SEO firm Graphite has been released. It reveals that AI systems are responsible for roughly half the articles published online. Axios’s Megan Morrone reported that researchers analyzed millions of pages from Common Crawl. They found that automated writing tools are shaping an ever-larger share of what we read. The specific numbers are debatable, but the direction of travel is clear.

AI-generated content is expanding fast. Spellcheck, predictive text, and grammar correction have been incorporated into our writing tools for decades. LLMs and reasoning engines are the next evolutionary step. Now that AI platforms can summarize data, they can also generate drafts. They verify facts too. Thus, there is little reason for a human to perform every step of routine content creation.

Many don’t realize that some classes of material have been automated for years. These include earnings summaries, weather reports, and sports results. Real estate listings and just about everything else that is data-driven are also automated. Corporate blogs and e-commerce product descriptions are increasingly written by AI, then lightly edited for tone or compliance.

Now the question is scale. As generative systems connect to live data and agentic systems mature, entire categories of “human” creative output will become machine-authored. Scores, game summaries, product reviews, and local news will soon be produced entirely by AI. The economics are unavoidable. The cost of generating this content is approaching zero. I truly believe that we are less than three years away from all content being free.

The web is being flooded with low-cost, low-value information. This is a huge opportunity for savvy creators. Trust, voice, and community will matter more than volume. AI slop can’t be stopped. Workslop, its close commercial cousin, also can’t be halted.

However, leveraging new technology to achieve business outcomes will always be a winning strategy.